Disciple
by Sevenstars
Summary: Not quite 16 and still grieving his lost family, Jess meets Dixie Howard and finds himself with a mentor—and the first of a long succession of trail-partners.


**Disciple**

_by Sevenstars_

SUMMARY: A look at Jess's relationship with Dixie Howard back when he was "a shirttail kid."

In "Men in Shadows," Jess tells Slim about the time, "ten years ago" (which would have been sometime in 1861 or '62), when he "pulled a gun" on Dixie Howard in a card game (apparently not knowing who he was dealing with) and got it shot out of his hand. After that, he says, "we rode together for a long time." I asked myself why Dixie spared this belligerent youngster—and why, thereafter, he was willing to let Jess ride with him, when apparently he had never before taken on a partner. Hence this fic. Beta'd by Katy.

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_Nine grows into big boy's pants and then to scars and pain,_

_Twenty's fast, and hard as nails,_

_Doesn't come again._

—"Pegasus and Flying Fish," sung by John Denver

_**Lampasas, Texas, March, 1861:**_

Jess stumbled backward till he hit the edge of the bar, clutching his stinging hand and staring wide-eyed at the big man in the steel-gray frock coat who faced him from the other side of the table, smoke curling from the muzzle of the nickel-plated, pearl-handled Remington he held. His eyes shifted to his own Colt Navy '51, lying on the floor a dozen feet away, and back again to the man's inscrutable face, and out of the clamor in his shocked mind one thought stood forth clearly: _I ain't never seen nothin' so fast!_

Neither had anyone else in the room, to judge by the murmuring going on around him. Jess caught his breath and pulled himself up, glaring at the man he'd accused of cheating. He knew what to expect. He'd made his play and taken his chances and now he'd pay for it. "Well?" he demanded, when his foe didn't cock the hammer for a second shot. "You gonna finish it, or what? 'Cause I ain't beggin'." The Harpers might not have had much, but they had pride, and if he had to die he was going to go out like a man.

"Not asking you to beg, boy," the big man told him calmly, and he gave the Remington a flat sidewise spin and tucked it into the cross-draw holster half-hidden under his coat. "Let me see that," he added, stepping around the table, and before the astonished Jess quite knew what was happening, he was unclutching his victim's hands and carefully scrutinizing the right one. Jess reflexively tried to pull away, and it was like trying to get free of a bear trap, though not anywhere near as painful. "Settle, boy," the man ordered, "I'm not planning to hurt you. If that was what I wanted, you'd be bleeding."

"I ain't a _boy," _snapped Jess, as a combination of shame and adrenalin flooded his mind and body. "I'm old enough to carry a gun, ain't I?"

The man met his flashing blue eyes with a mild, quizzical look. "Maybe so," he allowed, "but I'm not sure you know how to use it—or when, which is almost as important. Just how old _are_ you?"

Jess stuck his jaw out. "Eighteen."

The man didn't say anything, just looked at him. It reminded him, somehow, of his ma, and it was just as hard to face. "Sixteen," he amended. Then, after a beat or two: "Next month." And in a quick, furious outburst: "But I been workin' for pay since I was nine, and what business is it of yours anyhow?"

"Seeing that I could have killed you and didn't," was the reply, "I think it's pretty much whatever I want it to be." He looked Jess rakingly up and down: five feet seven of fine-boned, lean-built youngster with hands and feet that looked too big for the long limbs they were attached to; high cheekbones with deep hollows of hunger carved beneath, sharp features, prominent blade of a nose; dark blue eyes blazing with confusion and embarrassment, dark wavy hair badly in need of a barber's talents; skin drawn tight over muscle and bone, not an ounce of spare flesh anywhere on him, probably not more than a hundred and forty pounds stripped, and likely less. Coarse faded dun-colored trousers tucked into plain square-topped boots with runover heels and cracked, patched toes, the leather hilt of a knife thrusting up from the right one; threadbare, much-patched blue muslin shirt; frayed tan vest, calico bandanna, and battered old slouch hat. Everything about him—except, perhaps, for the well-cared-for Navy revolver on the floor and the soap-blackened holster at his hip—spoke of poverty and desperation. "When'd you eat last?" the man asked, and there was an odd gentleness to the question that brought a sudden lump to Jess's throat.

"Two days," he admitted in a subdued voice. "Maybe three. Unless you count jerky." He nodded toward the table. "I was hopin' to win enough to get some supplies..."

"Mistake number one," the big man interrupted. "Never play poker because you _need _money. It makes you scared of losing, and that makes you forget how the laws of it work—if you knew them to begin with." He took two long steps, bent and scooped up Jess's sixgun, weighed it a moment in his hand, and tucked it away under his coat, then turned back to the table, swept up his winnings, and laid a hand on Jess's bony shoulder; his grip wasn't hard, but its strength was unmistakable—and irresistible. "Come on," he said.

"Where?" asked Jess, not that he thought it mattered much at this point.

"To get you something to eat. You're too hungry to listen—or to think."

**SR**

Lampasas, Texas, at the tail end of the winter of 1860-1, was a tiny pioneer town, population about 270 (although the rural population it serviced was considerably larger than that), plunked down in the middle of the alternating belts of rolling and rugged hills, the latter covered with oak and hickory forests, that made up the so-called Prairie Plains region of the state. To the east lay the forest belt of the coastal plain; due west, the Blue Mountains, with the Edwards Plateau beyond; northwest, the hilly "rolling plains." Just about sixty miles southeast—a bit more than a day's travel, on a good well-fed horse—was Austin, the state capitol, which, located as it was on the navigable lower stretch of the Colorado River, put the place within five days' bull-train travel and permitted just about anything to be freighted in without much trouble, so long as the weather held good; so local folk, if they had cash money or store credit, could make their lives easier with all manner of manufactured things, from bolt goods for ladies' dresses to boughten furniture for their houses. The soil was rich, and settlers found it relatively easy to make a good living off the "three C's" of Texas agriculture—cattle, cotton, and corn. The businesses strung out along the main drag numbered no more than fifteen, but they included everything a country town needed, including a white clapboard café with a tin roof and a big frosted front window lettered _The Sideboard_. Inside, a long serving counter of plain pine ran along one wall, with oilcloth covering its top, stools ranged down its length, a large hazy mirror on the wall behind it, and a swinging door to the kitchen behind it; opposite was a row of booths, each with heavy curtains to close it off for privacy; and in between were scattered about a dozen heavy round tables, each with a red-checked cloth, a bowl of dried flowers, a caster with green glass bottles, and four hard, straight-backed chairs. Kerosene lamps with reflectors behind them studded the bare painted walls at regular intervals. Up near the front, opposite the combination cigar counter and cashier's station, was a glass case filled with homemade cakes, brown loaves of bread, stacks of doughnuts, and trays of pies. Jess's stomach growled at the good smells drifting out over the swinging door.

His guide pointed him at one of the booths, picked up a small brass bell that sat on the counter, rang it briskly, and without waiting for a response followed the half-starved youngster across the room and sat down. A waitress in a stiffly-starched cotton dress, probably not more than a year older than Jess, appeared out of the kitchen; her eyes swept the room, which was otherwise empty, and settled on their booth, and a bright smile appeared on her face. "Mr. Howard! You're early," she said, coming out from behind the counter and hurrying over to where they sat.

"And you're a delight to the eyes, as always, Bryn," said the man addressed as Howard. "My young friend here's been on short rations the last few days. What do you suggest in a case like that?"

She looked Jess over critically; he was too drained to even feel embarrassed. "If it was me," she decided, "I'd want something mild, but filling. Chicken, maybe."

"Chicken it is, and all the trimmings," Howard agreed. "And I'll have the venison, if there's any left."

She grinned. "I thought you might, so I put some aside for you. Back in a flash."

She fetched cornsticks and cold bean salad to keep them satisfied while their main meal cooked, and Jess tried not to wolf his down, not too successfully. He'd run out of everything but jerked beef and tinned milk three days ago, and had been living on those, stewed together, ever since; he hadn't even tasted coffee since Batesville.

The chicken, when it came, had been skillet-fried in butter the slow Texas way; there was hot creamed gravy to go with it, hominy grits, baked pinto beans, succotash, and boiled carrots, besides corn lightbread, made of part wheat flour and part cornmeal, with butter and wild-grape jelly. There were pickles too—peach pickles and beet pickles and pickled tomatoes—and hot, sweet black coffee. The smell and taste of the chicken was almost enough to make Jess tear up, it reminded him so powerfully of home. He hated the thought of being so obviously destitute as to invite charity, but he had the practicality of all who live by their own exertions, and he was well aware that he couldn't continue his hunt much longer without either a job, money, or somebody's treat. He put his head down and began eating steadily, reluctant to meet Howard's eyes. The man's venison, he could tell from the aroma, had been roasted with honey and grape leaves to give it a tang. His ma had known how to do that, and Sophie and Francie had learned it from her. Back before Jess was even born, Uncle Cam had fetched some cuttings of wild mustang-grapes for her to plant around the porch posts specifically so she could have grape leaves for it—and grapes for jelly and pie, of course. Those grapevines were ashes now, blowing on the Panhandle winds; nobody would ever eat their fruit again. The thought of that, of his mother and his uncle, both gone even before Pa and the littl'uns, and of the recent losses to which they led his memory (not that those losses were ever very far from it), made his throat close up a moment, and he gulped coffee to force it open again. He fixed his attention on the food, and ate, and tried not to think. He'd gotten pretty good at that, of necessity, this last year—had it been a year already? Yes, it nearly had. April sixth—just two days after his birthday—had been the day his world had crumbled into pieces.

Bryn brought yellow pound cake for dessert, with fig and strawberry preserves to spoon over it. "Better now?" asked Howard, when Jess had cleaned up the last of his.

"Yeah." Jess's voice was husky. "I ain't got enough to pay you. But I'll send it soon as I can—you tell me where."

"No need," Howard told him. "It was only thirty-five cents, and you wouldn't say that if somebody at a ranch or a farm had fed you, would you?"

" 'Course not," said Jess, rather indignantly. Nobody was ever turned away in the West, because of the distances. Even his folks, though they'd had little enough, had never hesitated to share it with any wanderer who stopped by. "But that ain't the same."

"I don't see a difference," retorted Howard. "You needed food, and I had the means to provide it. By the way, what name do you go by?" It was a particularly grown-up way to phrase the question, since any man beyond the age of sixteen or so might very possibly have a black spot or two in his past that he'd want to cover up with an alias.

"My own. Jess Harper."

"Dixie Howard."

Jess's jaw dropped. He'd never really gone to school—there just weren't any in the Panhandle country, apart from the one in Amarillo that the Brady kids attended—but Ma had been determined that all her children must learn to read and sign their names, if nothing more, and over the long winter days she'd taught them around the big table in the warm kitchen. (She had given slighter shrift to arithmetic, which was why Jess's was elementary at best: he could count to a hundred (and then count the hundreds up to a hundred, if he'd provided himself with a symbol of each, like a knot in a string), add, subtract, and (with considerable mental effort) multiply, but just about anything beyond that was more than he could handle.) They'd had only a few books—the Bible, a set of readers, a speaker, and a rhetoric, Parson Weems's lives of Penn, Washington, Franklin, and Francis Marion, Plutarch, Aesop, _Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, _the Lane translation of _The Arabian Nights,_ _Don Quixote, _the poetry of Byron and Scott and the latest unitary edition of Longfellow, Pierce Egan's _Robin Hood and Little John; or The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest,_ a history of Texas, Pope's Homer, a complete Shakespeare, Burns and Thomas Hood, Ossian and _Thaddeus of Warsaw,_ some of Cooper and Marryat and Dickens, Exquemelin's accounts of the buccaneers and Robert Bird's _Nick of the Woods, _many of them brought by Amanda Harper to her marriage, the rest painstakingly chosen and accumulated over the years as finances permitted—and even when they got to town, which happened about twice a year, there were no bookstores there; but the West was the melting pot to end all melting pots, and you never knew who was educated or a reader, so every community had at least one store that stocked some kind of reading matter. Most of what Jess and his brothers read had been the cheaply-bound paperbacked "blood-and-thunders" that cost anywhere from twelve and a half to thirty-one cents each and so weren't hard to finance out of a winter trap line or a few young mustang colts caught and green-broken. Jess could remember—it was, in fact, one of his earliest recollections—being six years old, listening as his oldest brother, Ben, not long before he and Jake left home—he must have been only a little older than Jess was now—read aloud to him and Francie and Sophie (Johnny was only two or three then, too young to sit still long enough) from one of them: _Dixie Howard, or, The Gentleman Gunfighter-Gambler_. Later he'd read it for himself, Ben having left it behind when he took off. And there had been others, at least half a dozen of them over the years. _Is __that__ who I called a cheat?_ he thought, shocked. _I'm lucky I'm alive!_

Dixie Howard didn't need to cheat. Everybody knew that, even if they hadn't read the books. He was that good. He only cheated if he found somebody else trying to cheat him.

Jess had never seriously considered the possibility of meeting this man in the flesh, any more than he had expected to ever shake hands with Governor Sam Houston. It was like meeting... oh, Davy Crockett, maybe, or Hiawatha, or Robin Hood, or George Washington. _And he'd drawn on him!_ And Howard had not only spared his life, he'd bought him dinner! It was too much. He couldn't take it in. Dixie Howard, who had followed the gold rush to California and the Comstock, travelled to Cuba and Europe, played the Mississippi riverboats, killed his man in a dozen or more gunfights... even Uncle Cam had spoken respectfully of him, though he'd never claimed to have met him. And here he was, in Lampasas, sitting in the same café booth with Jess Harper and paying for the best meal he'd had in weeks. Late winter wasn't a good time to find work in the range country—not that Jess would have been entirely willing to take a job if it had been offered; he'd finally gotten what sounded like a good lead on Bannister, or at least some of his gang, and he was afraid that if he delayed in following it up, they'd be gone by the time he got there. That was why he'd staked his last few dollars at that poker game; if the cards had fallen his way, he'd have had travel money enough for another month or two. Looking back at it now, from a little distance, he wasn't entirely sure he'd really believed he'd been cheated even before he knew who he was playing with. He'd just been so mad at losing his little money... the Harper temper had never been noted for its forebearance.

"From the way you're looking at me," said Howard, "you've heard the name." There was a hint of amusement in his tone—not at Jess, perhaps, so much as at the situation.

Jess shut his mouth in a hurry. "Yeah." Since this was probably the only famous person he would ever see at close range, he looked the man over carefully, storing up details in his mind in case he might one day be asked about him. Howard was well over six feet, big-boned, solid, likely a good two hundred pounds or better, yet Jess remembered the speed and grace with which he had moved. His face was heavy-featured, not what you'd call exactly handsome, an outdoorsman's face, yet lacking the squint lines and weather-scores of one who lived exclusively in the open. His voice was smooth and deep and resonant, and he talked as if he'd had a lot more schooling than Jess, but his accent wasn't Texan; he could have been from Virginia or any place between there and New England. He was probably about twice Jess's age, early thirties. Under the gray frock coat he wore darker gray striped trousers, a loosely-tied midnight-blue cravat, an elaborately tucked and hemstitched linen shirt with a standing collar, and a fancy pink waistcoat; his cuffs were secured with cameoed silver buttons, and the cravat with a pearl stickpin. A slender gold watch chain was draped across his middle, and on his wedding finger was a crystal ring with a lock of hair in it. But his hat was a rangeman's hat, a broad-brimmed flat-crowned black "wide-awake" style with silver plates along the band, and while his boot-tops were hidden under his pant legs, their high heels and pointed toes were those of a cattleman.

"So, then, Jess Harper," Howard went on, after having given him plenty of time, "what's a kid of fifteen doing sitting in on a poker game and accusing the winner of cheating?"

"Needed money, like I said," Jess answered meagerly. "Somebody I got to find. Ain't got time to be takin' a job even if there was many this time of year."

"From the looks of you," said Howard, "that's been your guiding principle for a while already."

"Bullets and grub's more important than clothes," said Jess.

"Well, whoever you're trying to find," observed Howard, "I hope he's not too fast. Because you're not. Your reflexes are good, but you haven't got the science of it. Any half-decent gun will have you dead before you slap leather."

Jess frowned. Bannister wasn't a gunfighter; he didn't need to be, not leading a gang the size of his. Or did he? It was known that the gang liked to split up after a raid, to make the individual members harder to find, then come together at some prearranged place and time to plan their next venture. Without his outfit to help protect him, Bannister would be vulnerable to any Ranger or local lawman who happened to catch sight of him. And maybe, too, an outlaw boss needed to be faster than anyone who followed him, so he could command their loyalty and obedience—and cut down on the chance of any of them trying to take over from him. He might not be a professional in the sense that Howard was, but likely he did have to know how to get his iron into action quick and smooth. For an instant a hint of uneasy doubt made itself felt, but then Jess shook his head. "Then I reckon I'll have to learn as I go," he said, " 'cause he owes me. Owes me plenty, and I aim to collect."

"Something personal?" Howard guessed. He reached into his coat for a gold cigar case, removed a thin Havana cheroot from it, snipped the end off with a tiny silver scissor clipped to his watch chain, produced a big wooden lucifer match, scratched it on the leg of the table and lit up.

Jess hesitated. "My family," he said at last. "He killed most of 'em, or anyways he ordered it done."

The man seemed to think about that. "Does he know you're after him?"

"I don't reckon. I was some behind him 'fore I could get on his trail." The Bradys were Texans too, and they'd understood what he had to do, being the senior Harper available for the task—there was no telling where Ben and Jake were. But he'd needed to earn enough for a horse and a saddle—the Navy Colt was his own, bought out of his cowhand earnings when he was twelve—and that had taken time, two good months; thank the Lord spring roundup had started right after the raid, and there'd been work a-plenty. For a moment he thought wistfully of Francie and Johnny, whom he'd left at the Brady place. He knew the Bradys would be decent to them, but that didn't make it any easier not to have them around. When you grew up one of nine, you never felt quite right by yourself. Only, of course, he couldn't ask anyone else—except Ben and Jake, if he ever got a line on them—to side him in this. It was Harper business, a Harper debt, and it was up to him to settle it.

"Can't have been that long ago, not at your age," Howard mused.

"Last spring," said Jess.

"So you're in it for the long haul."

"Yeah. Till it's done. I got to."

"Which way are you headed?" Howard inquired casually.

"North, I reckon. Heard some word I might get a line on him in Weatherford." One or two of the gang had supposedly been seen there. Jess might be hot for revenge, but he wasn't stupid; he knew he'd never stand a chance going up against the whole lot of them by himself. His best chance would be to catch up with them one or two at a time, in between jobs, and take as many out as he could before he faced Bannister man-to-man.

"Weatherford, huh? Good little town. Bigger than this one. Hear they're almost up to five hundred citizens now. Not far from Fort Worth, either. Might take a ride that way myself. Feel like having company?"

Jess shrugged. "Don't matter."

"Well," said Howard, "in that case, you need a haircut. And a new shirt, yours doesn't have much life left in it. I'll stake you."

"Ain't askin' for no charity," Jess growled. He'd had to take enough of that from the Bradys—trail gear, some of Gil's clothes, an old Colt Ring-Trigger revolving carbine and a reloading kit, since of course everything he'd owned, except for what he stood up in, had gone up in the fire. But the Bradys were neighbors, as such things were reckoned in the vast distances of West Texas, and the Harpers would have done the same for them, if it'd been opposites around; so that made it bearable.

"Settle," Howard told him easily. "You should be able to get some kind of work up there, even if it's just for a few days. You can pay me back then. Not charity. A loan. Look at it this way: folks are a lot likelier to give you polite answers to your questions if you don't look like poor white trash. Not that I say that's what you _are,"_ he added, "just that it's pretty clear you haven't been thinking too much of the impression you make, lately."

Jess held his tongue and pondered the idea. "Reckon I do look kinda shabby," he allowed grudgingly. After all, a haircut would be four bits at most, and a shirt maybe six or eight. A day's wage or a little over. It would be easy enough to pay the man back.

"Fair enough, then," said Howard decisively. "What plans did you have for the night?"

He _wasn't_ going to let himself be staked to a room as well. "Plenty of open out there. I'll get just past the town limits, peg my horse out so he can graze and make a camp close by."

"That's fine. Meet me here for breakfast at six, and we can get an early start." Howard obviously figured that Jess knew how to tell time by the sun, which was true; anyone reared on the range learned that skill.

And so it came about that the next morning, with fresh-cut hair and a new purple check shirt, Jess found himself tucking into an abundant Texas-size breakfast of buttery scrambled eggs, ham, steak, beans, hash-brown potatoes, fluffy hot soda-and-buttermilk biscuits with butter and honey and a choice of peach or strawberry preserves, apple pie, and coffee. Howard had packed away his town finery in favor of rich whipcord trousers, a blue-and-white-checkered shirt with garters to hold the sleeves, age-softened buckskin vest, brown corduroy jacket, and thin black gloves—nothing showy, but all of it the best available fit and quality; he'd changed his cross-draw rig—the most efficient to use when a man wore a long suit-coat—for a conventional side holster. His horse turned out to be what was called in Spanish an _oscura_—a peculiar brown with faint inner black markings—rigged out with a silver-mounted Mexican saddle and a headstall of carved leather almost completely covered with fluted and engraved silver and finished off with crossed-chain browbands.

They rode north by a little east, not talking much, but Jess was aware of Howard's quiet scrutiny—and of the Navy .36 that had been handed back to him last evening after supper, a symbol of the life Howard could have taken and hadn't. _I owe him,_ he found himself thinking. _But I can't. Bannister and his, they're enough for any one man. What do I do? I can't let him think I don't know he could'a' killed me. It ain't that he saved my life exactly, but I owe it to him, just the same._

Three easy days' travel brought them to Weatherford with just two or three days left of March. "Reckon this is where we split up," Jess ventured cautiously.

"Reckon it is," Howard agreed in his mild way. "Fort Worth's not much more than twenty-five miles; I can make it in less than a day, and get in on the payday rush. You know who you're looking for?"

"I can find 'em," said Jess, grimly.

"Well," said Howard, "better make sure they've been drinking and you haven't before you call them, because it's like I told you before: you've got potential, but you need to work at it."

Jess frowned; that sounded just a little like taking unfair advantage. Still, maybe taking the advice would be enough to balance things between the two of them. "I'll hold it in mind," he agreed.

Weatherford was buzzing with talk over the news from the East—not hard to get this close to Dallas, which besides being one of the biggest towns in the state, was located on the Trinity River and got the riverboats with their loads of gossip and newspapers and magazines. It had been less than a month since Lincoln was inaugurated, though Texans didn't consider him _their_ President, the state having voted for secession on February 1 and approved it by public referendum three weeks afterward. In his inaugural address, he had emphasized his position on the vital issue of slavery, stating that he wasn't opposed to the institution where it was already established, yet had also declared that states voting for secession were in error, since "the Union of these States is perpetual." Taking the stance that acts against the Federal government were "insurrectionary or revolutionary," he had told refractory Southerners that the "momentous issue of civil war" was in their hands, not his. The seven Confederate states had for their part chosen a president, a former Senator, Secretary of War, and Mexican War officer named Jefferson Davis, who had appointed three trusted men to go to Washington and approach officials there with offers for the peaceful negotiations of differences, and at his own swearing-in had declared, "We protest solemnly in the face of mankind that we desire peace at any sacrifice save that of honor and independence;" yet he had also insisted on "the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed, and...the right of the people to alter or abolish them at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established." Meanwhile, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, an undermanned (and incomplete) island fort called Sumter remained the focus of a continuing stalemate; the state had repeatedly demanded its surrender, which its commanding officer refused to give, but his messages to his superiors in Washington made it apparent that it couldn't be maintained without replacements and reinforcements, not to speak of supplies, and that the estimated number of troops required to hold it would be something like 20,000—a figure Jess could barely even imagine, and only then in terms of cattle or buffalo. Southern-born Army and Navy officers, including a great many of the former in the Western territories, had been resigning and going home ever since the election returns became known, and enlisted men too, leaving posts everywhere understaffed and depriving the military of the bulk of its experienced people, the Army especially having long been a traditional haven for upper-class Southern boys who didn't inherit businesses or large tracts of land. State troops had seized Fort Jackson and the Oglethorpe Barracks in Savannah, Georgia, Fort Pulaski on the Savannah River, Forts Morgan and Gaines at the entrance to Mobile Bay, revenue craft in Mobile Harbor, at New Orleans, and at Galveston, Forts Barrancas, McRee, Marion, and Pickens and the Pensacola naval yard in Florida, the Branch Mint and Customs House and the U.S. Paymaster's office in New Orleans, Forts Pike and Macomb and the U.S. Marine Hospital nearby, Forts Jackson and St. Philip and the Baton Rouge arsenal and barracks, Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island in the Mississippi Gulf, the arsenals at Augusta, Georgia, Mount Vernon, Alabama, Apalachicola, Florida, and Little Rock, Arkansas, a store of Federal munitions at Napoleon, Arkansas, and the arsenal and barracks at San Antonio. An American vessel outside Charleston had been fired on by a Confederate battery. Of the string of seventeen forts along the Rio Grande and the Texas frontier, U.S. troops had thus far abandoned Camps Cooper, Colorado, Wood, Verde, and Hudson, Ringgold Barracks, and Forts McIntosh, Clarke, Inge, Lancaster, Brown, Duncan, and Chadbourne; none had been notable for a large contingent—they averaged a little over ninety men apiece—but the trend was clear. Although members of several garrisons had made their way to the safety of the Indian territory or Kansas, or been evacuated from coastal ports, those in the stations west of San Antonio had been forced to surrender to state authorities, who were now said to be advancing on Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, the westernmost of them all—though speculation had it that the personnel there might already have fled to New Mexico, just over the line. At high noon on March 16, all Texas state officials had been required to take oaths of allegiance to the newly organized Confederacy. First to be summoned was Governor Sam Houston; three times his name was called, but he didn't appear. Locked in his executive chamber, refusing to lead Texas out of the Union, he was writing his last "Address to the People of Texas." His office was declared vacant, and Lieutenant-Governor Clark took his place, to helm the state until the election later that year.

This particular part of Texas had never been a stronghold of slavery or the plantation culture, and many people were lukewarm toward the idea of war, but they also saw that if things went on as they were going, that would be the ultimate and unavoidable result; Washington couldn't go on forever ignoring the capture or molestation of its property. Many, too, pointed out that the United States itself had come into being through acts which England had doubtless thought "insurrectionary or revolutionary"—not to speak of the fact that if Texas hadn't revolted, back in '36, she'd still be part of Mexico. At the same time there were still many who agreed with Houston that Texas was, at least spiritually, part of the Union and always would be, and as certain hotheads called the ex-Governor a traitor for exactly that reason, occasionally violence erupted between the various factions.

Through it all Jess moved quietly, keeping low and listening. He didn't know the names of the men he sought; he wasn't even sure he'd recognize them if he saw them. His chief hope was to hear something of someone boasting of an association with Bannister. He had managed to find work as a stablehand, a dollar a day plus found for himself and his horse; it was day work, which left him free to scout the resorts of the town by night, when they were most likely to be active, and also gave him a listening ear at one of the greatest gossip mills any small town afforded. He set aside a dollar thirty to repay Howard, got his boots repaired (though the cobbler advised him to think about new ones instead), and put the rest of his money by for supplies. His last year of wandering and searching, with his losses and the grief they had inflicted, had hardened and aged his face, making him look older than he was; none of the bartenders balked at selling him a beer—which he didn't drink anyway; he just nursed it and kept his ears open. Jess had been hunting wild game for his family's table since he was big enough to keep two ends of a long gun off the ground; he could be patient when he had to.

It took him almost a week, but eventually he found out what he needed to know. There had indeed been two of Bannister's men in Weatherford, but they'd moved on almost a month before. Which way? Nobody seemed to have a clue.

Suddenly Jess was at loose ends. Where was he to go now? Texas was so big, and then there were the Indian Nations, not even a hundred miles away on a straight line, or New Mexico some three hundred west, or even Mexico itself a little more than four hundred south. Despair half choked him, and doubt settled heavily on his spirit. Did he really have any chance of avenging his family? Howard had said he couldn't hope to stand up against any half-decent gun, and Howard ought to know; he'd probably seen plenty of them. And even if he could, how would he find the men he sought, twenty moving needles in the vast haystack—over a quarter-million square miles, he'd heard tell—that was Texas?

Then came the day he went out to meet an arriving rider, and looked up to find himself staring into Howard's face once again. "What—what are you doin' back here?" he blurted.

"Looking for you," the gunfighter replied easily, dismounting. "Didn't expect it to be so quick, I admit, but then stable work's usually easy to find, and a good way to hear the news too."

"They ain't here," said Jess softly. "They moved on. Don't nobody seem to know where to." Why he confided this he had no idea, except that Howard was at least a familiar face in one of the biggest towns he'd visited yet—certainly bigger than Amarillo, which had comprised the sum total of his urban experience up till last year—and the disappointment of his hopes had left him bewildered and aching for some kind of counsel.

"When do you get off?" Howard asked.

"Six o'clock, when the night man comes on," Jess replied without thinking.

"All right," said Howard. "Get yourself a bath and wash off the stable smell, and meet me at the Exchange Hotel at seven. I'll buy you supper."

"I ain't askin'—" Jess began.

"No, but I am. Consider it an invitation."

Jess's Southern roots and the deprivations of his boyhood, coupled with what he knew of his parents' disownment by their families, had given him a fierce and sometimes belligerent pride, since it cost nothing and was one of the few things no one could take from him; yet his mother, at least, had come from good people, and had always stressed to her young the importance of responding in a mannerly way to the overtures of others. His losses had left him not only grieving and thirsty for revenge, but terrified of bonding with anyone else, ever again, for fear they too would be taken from him—and at the same time desperately yearning for human closeness to take the place of what he had once had. Confused, disappointed, and unsure of his next move, he latched onto the offer without much urging needed. "A'right," he agreed quietly.

The Exchange, he'd come to know, was the best place to stay in Weatherford, so he stopped at the dry-goods store on his way to the bathhouse and bought a new blue cotton shirt, and blew a dime to have his aged boots shined by a boy on the corner. Howard was waiting for him in the lobby, perusing a week-old copy of the _Galveston Citizen;_ he'd changed from his trail clothes to the gray frock and trousers Jess remembered from Lampasas. He urged Jess to try the fried-oyster appetizer—something Jess had never tasted before, but found better than he'd expected—and treated him to a porterhouse steak with mushrooms, the best meal in the place, with young onions and new radishes on the side, mashed potatoes, baked beans, stewed tomatoes, and apple pie for dessert.

"You do okay in Fort Worth?" Jess asked, trying to be polite, as Ma would have wanted.

"Not as good as the last time I was there," Howard admitted. "People seem to be holding their breath—and their money—waiting to see if we'll end up in a war."

"You reckon we will?"

"I know we will, sooner or later. Texas isn't in the Union any more, you know. Or did you?"

Jess shrugged. "I heard. Don't seem like it's got much to do with me."

"It will, before long," the gunfighter told him. "This is going to come to fighting, no matter what Lincoln or Davis say publicly. And when it does, every man in Texas will have to take sides—or have them taken for him."

Jess frowned. "Why?"

"That would take a lot more than one evening to explain to you," Howard said. "Now tell me about those men you were hunting. Something to do with your family being killed?"

Jess's breath caught in his throat and he squeezed his eyes shut a moment, fighting off the memories and the pain. And then, without knowing why, he began to talk. Softly but steadily, he explained what had happened just over a year earlier and who had been responsible for it. "My brother and sister are with some friends of my folks', in Amarillo," he finished. "They wanted me to stay too, but I—I'm too old to be taken care of by women. I got a job to do."

"Did it occur to you that maybe you're still just a little too young to do that job?" Howard asked. "I've heard of the Bannisters—who hasn't? The last word I had there were almost twenty of them. No one man, no matter how good he is, can fight that many by himself."

"I know that. I seen 'em, that day. I don't reckon on lettin' 'em take me before I get to Bannister. They split after a job, one's and two's, I hear tell, so's to be harder for the law to find. I aim to find 'em in between jobs, when they ain't got each other for backup. I aim to take 'em down, one by one, till there ain't only Bannister left. If it takes me twenty years, that's how I aim to do it, 'cause what else do I got to live for?"

"Well, that's good," said Howard. "That tells me something important about you. It says that you can observe, and think, and plan—even if you _are_ a quick-tempered hothead," and then he chuckled as Jess's head came up and a frown crossed his face. "That's one of the biggest differences between a gun_fighter_ and a gun_man_. A gunfighter has a brain, and he uses it. A gunman, well, it's about what the word suggests: he's a gun in a man's shape, and a gun doesn't think." He thoughtfully got out one of his Havana cheroots, lit it and set it going, all without letting his eyes leave Jess as the youngster stirred the remains of the food on his plate with an idle fork. "You think," he went on. "Not as much as you should, maybe, but it's a start. And, like I told you once before, you've got good reflexes, which is to be expected at your age; what you need now is to get the science of it. It might give you the edge. I can give you that science."

Jess looked up sharply. "Why would you care?"

"Any number of reasons," said Howard lightly. "Maybe I think somebody as young as you shouldn't totally waste himself by going up against odds he can't hope to buck. Maybe I don't like people who murder children. Maybe I just think men like Bannister are a blot on the good name of Texas. Maybe," he continued, "I feel that every young man should learn a useful trade—and every man who already has one should feel an obligation to pass on the secrets he's learned, so they don't die with him. Remember how broke you were when we met? That wouldn't happen if you followed my line. You could work for pay a few months out of the year and earn enough—assuming you have the kind of frugal habits I think you do—to finance your search for the rest of it. You said you've got no idea where to go next; what do you have to lose?"

"Nothin', I reckon," Jess agreed slowly. He thought about what the man had said—and about Howard's blunt assertion, in Lampasas, that he "wasn't fast," and what that had made him think about. He'd said, back then, that he was in this for the long haul. He was obligated to keep himself alive until he could finish the job he'd undertaken; he owed that to his dead. If Howard was willing to teach him the skills that could better his chances, wasn't he equally obligated to accept the offer?

And it would mean travelling together, and maybe, somehow, he'd get an opportunity to balance out the debt he felt he owed the man.

_Life sure ain't simple,_ he thought tiredly, _if you want to behave like a man grown._ Somehow, he had figured opposites around.

"Well, then?" Howard prompted. "They say that if we do come to war, it will be over in six months. I think they're underestimating, but for now, till I see how things work out, I'm going to get out of Texas, head for Denver. Territories can't be called on to provide regiments in war, and Denver's a rich town and the center of a rich district. We can do well there. Want to come?"

Their eyes met. Jess hesitated one last uncertain moment, then nodded. "Yeah, I'll come," he said.

**SR**

And so it began. Up the Shawnee Trail to Muskogee in the Creek Nation they rode, then northwest along the Arkansas to the big bend, where they picked up the Santa Fe Trail and followed it through Fort Wise (sometimes known as Bent's New Fort), then took the Cherokee Trail to Denver. Five hundred miles, a leisurely twelve or fourteen days' riding and a world away from everything Jess knew.

From their very first hours on the trail, Dixie Howard began teaching him. "It's not about the first shot that's fired," he said. "It's about the first bullet that goes where it's supposed to. Remember what I said in Weatherford, about the difference between a gunfighter and a gunman? I'm not saying a gunman isn't fast, because he is. That's his edge—he's fast, first, last, and always. That's his primary weapon—that, and his willingness to take unfair advantage, shooting his man in the back or taking him unarmed, or banding together with others to outnumber him. But it doesn't really matter, in the end, how fast you can get your iron into action; what matters is whether you can be the first man to hit what he's aiming at. A gunman will always try to keep the fight close-quarters, so he has a better chance of doing that; close-up shooting makes it easier to score—you know that from hunting game, it's why you stalk your prey. You need to hold him off at a bit of a distance, ideally forty feet or better; that compensates for his speed. It lets you take your time, and that's a good thing, because he'll naturally be doing what he does best, being fast, and when afterward the witnesses talk to the law, they'll have to say he drew first. That makes it self-defense and puts you in the clear."

Jess listened intently, dark brows slanting quizzically. He hadn't thought of this before. He'd figured that since everybody knew what Frank Bannister was, any man who killed him would be, in a sense, performing a public service. Yet if he must finance his search, and if he was to do it by the best-paying means available—the hiring out of his gun—then he saw that keeping his actions within legal bounds would make sense. He couldn't kill Bannister if he got himself hung for murder before he ever got near the man.

"A gang, in one important way, is like a trail crew," Dixie went on. "A man rides with it because he knows he can't get the job done all by himself. It's one thing to have a partner or two to watch your back; no gunfighter would pass that up, if he found one he could trust. It's another to need the weight of numbers on your side."

"So how do you make up for that?" Jess asked.

Dixie smiled. "By using that brain of yours, boy," he said. "Using it to think and plan—and to learn." And he taught Jess how to stand, how to breathe, how to aim before he went for his gun. How to leap off to the side in a jump and roll, or fall straight forward, belly-down, and thus take his enemies off guard—"A man lying on the ground makes a difficult target; if he's rolling, he's an even worse one. And of all moving targets, a dropping one is the hardest to hit. Your enemies will fire straight at a standing target, you'll be firing breast-aim or from your left side at a backlit target. They won't even know where you went." How a man holding a gun on you was all keyed up and ready to shoot when he first got the drop, but after a while his muscles got a little heavy, and his reactions would be a little slower—"so if you can draw it out, do that. Waiting never did the coolest gunman any good." How to get back control of the situation when covered—perhaps, if ordered to unbuckle your rig and let it drop, by catching your gun-butt as the holster slid past your hanging hand, whipping it up, and firing; or, if already holding some object in one hand, by keeping your hands raised and waiting till your enemy relaxed his guard a little ("he always will, eventually"), then, with a quick flip of hand and wrist, sending the object flying straight at his head, starting your draw the instant your hand released it—"He'll try to dodge it, and if he pulls the trigger at the same moment his shot will go wide"; or, if you were close enough, by raising your hands slowly till they were at eye level, then, with one swift motion, sweeping off your hat with your left hand and slapping your foe across the face with it, while at the same time your right, swinging fast, knocked up the gun muzzle so it discharged harmlessly into the air, giving you an instant in which to draw and back into a corner before the astonished spectators could register what had happened. How, if a man was mad and coming at you, you had to get him right through the heart or brain or on a big bone to stop him, while an unexpected shot could drop him in his tracks—"Like a grizzly bear," Dixie said. "If you're hidden, three or four well-placed bullets can kill him, but fire those same bullets into the same spots when he's looking at you and he'll cover a surprising amount of ground to get to you."

Another time he said, "Give any man time to think about death and he fears it. Self-preservation is the first law; it's an instinct, in us and in the animals. Try to outbluff him first; give him that time, and he may back down. But if he doesn't, be ready to match your ability against his. Stand up to the job as though you're equal to it, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred you'll find that you are. In any fight, self-confidence is almost as good as a weapon."

He taught Jess that it wasn't smart to let himself get below another man's gun, and conversely, that a man who could get above his opponent always held a big advantage. That if he was shooting downhill, he should aim low—at his quarry's knees, or, if he was mounted, at the center of his belly. That a man on the ground always had the advantage over a man on horseback when gunfire was being exchanged, as did one shooting from shade to sun, while firing downward out of sunlight into shadow—and hitting—was tricky. That nine men out of ten, shooting by moonlight, would aim too high, and shooting in dusk light or upward through window glass was uncertain business. "In fact," Dixie said, "even shooting dead level through glass is likely to throw your aim off a little; the glass creates distortion, just the way water does when you look down through it at frogs or fish or crawdaddies on the bottom. So if you're inside and your enemies are out, break out the pane before you fire." That indoors after dark, if he was facing more than one man—or even if he only thought there was a chance of others jumping into the fight—his primary rule should be to "get the light." "Plunging, blinding darkness has disarmed more desperate gunmen than all the daylight stands ever made. If you can keep your word-strings short, and force your play before all eyes get used to the darkness, you have some chance, even against odds of four or five to one. Remember, too, that it's second nature for an outnumbered man to get his back against a wall—and your enemies will know that. _You_ know where you are, and that's all that matters; anyone except you is a target. Get low, but stay out in the middle of the floor; they'll be looking for you around the perimeter. And if you want to hide your gunflash, take off your hat, hold it in front of the muzzle of your gun, and fire through the crown. The other fellows may figure the angle of your shot pretty accurately in a minute or two, but maybe not the height or the exact position.

"The only way to win any kind of fight," he said, "is to attack with what you have. That's one of the secrets of success: strike at the first sign of trouble—never give your enemy time to plan or prepare. And remember the attacker has one big advantage: he can choose the time of the fight. Plus, any surprised man will shoot high at first, and that gives you just a little bit of an edge."

He explained that a .44 slug would penetrate seven to nine inches of pine, and—given a sufficient powder load—go as far as a thousand yards, but you had to aim high in the air, and for hundreds of yards of trajectory the bullet would be way above the enemy's head. If you were shooting at a horseman you figured to be three hundred yards away, and he was really only two hundred and fifty, you'd miss—so you had to be able to gauge your distances accurately. This was equally true at lesser ranges; the margin might not be so big, but a missed shot, even if only by a quarter of an inch, was still a missed shot, and did you no good and your enemy, maybe, quite a lot. "You judge range through your ability to combine and utilize two views—that of your right eye and that of your left. Up to around 480 yards—just over a quarter of a mile—with practice, your brain will automatically triangulate and tell you the distance; keep practicing until it's second nature. Six to seven is the minimum range of the relaxed human eye; that's why your common gunman likes to keep his fights around that distance, because then he doesn't have to take that extra second or two. And he doesn't need to aim; speed is the important thing, and he just points his gun instinctively, firing the instant it levels out from the holster."

He taught Jess to keep a mental count of how many rounds he had fired, because if a man wanted to stay alive, he always knew how many shots he had left. To turn sideways just as he made his play, profile-on to his opponent, because that made a smaller target. He explained that you could generally figure on a standing man making a target roughly sixty-six inches high and eighteen to twenty-four wide, and that three rounds (assuming you knew you had only one foe) was "just about right": a man could still kill you with a round in the heart, but three in the trunk, even if he was only gut-shot, generally made him lose interest in further plans, and left you with two as insurance. That your target should be almost any place between your victim's belt and shoulders; if you struck there and didn't kill him, you at least had time for a second shot. That if you were in a terrible hurry, or your target wasn't in the clear, right above the belt buckle was the place to aim; it would bring him down to the floor as if axed, and ten to one it would catch some bone inside and maybe slap up even into the heart. "It's the good shot, the safety shot, and a smart gunfighter never forgets that." That if you had to protect yourself but didn't want to kill your man, below the knee was exactly the right place to hit him: he fell down, but wasn't fatally hurt. "But it requires pretty accurate aiming in times of stress," Dixie qualified. That you should never be mad when you drew—"it stiffens you up in the wrist." That you should never pull the trigger on an empty chamber—you'd ruin the firing pin; if you didn't want to waste powder—if you were just practicing your draw, for example, and not target-shooting—you should use a dummy shell instead. That any man who carried a gun and wanted to stay alive had to be able to think fast and act faster, since to reach hesitantly or bluff was just courting suicide. That Eley's percussion caps were the best to be had, and therefore the only brand a careful man would buy, though even with them you could figure on one in twelve not firing.

He taught the youngster the poker-chip draw: to place a chip on the back of his right hand, extend it before him at shoulder level, twist his arm slowly and let it slide off, and then, in a sudden blur of speed, draw and fire. "Your goal is to get your gun out, cocked, levelled, and fired three times before the chip hits the ground. That's tolerably fast; if you can do it, you know you're doing all right. It's an easy way to check up on yourself—if you can't do it, don't start fights." That he should clean his weapon thoroughly after using it, and always treat it with respect. "Draw to shoot, and shoot to kill. To borrow a line from Keats, 'that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.' " That the first rule before a gunfight was no whiskey, and the second was no food; a man stood an outside chance if he took a belly shot on an empty stomach, but if it was full, he was through.

He taught Jess all the "mean, low-down tricks" that an enemy might use to take him down unawares: approach quietly from behind, draw, call to him, and, as he turned, let him have it before he realized his danger. Or go up to him, introduce himself, and offer to shake hands, then, when Jess stuck out his right, grab it with his left and jerk him forward as he drew—"You won't have a chance," Dixie said. Or disarm him from behind, then toss his gun on the floor several feet in front of him and tell him to pick it up. "You'll dive for it and try to roll and shoot, but you'll be just a split second too late because he already has his out. You'll roll just in time to get a bullet in the front, to make good on a claim of self-defense."

"So," said Jess, "if somebody tries that trick with me, what do I do?"

"Go sideways," said Dixie. "Remember, he has to wait till you have your hand on your gun; he won't fire till you make your move. So before you do, take that extra thirty or sixty seconds to check your surroundings for a spot where you can take shelter. Then try to get above the other man, behind him, out of the building—any place where he can't see what you're up to. That cancels out a little of his advantage, because he doesn't know what to expect. It may even give you an opportunity to get the drop on him and get _his_ gun away from him."

Above all, he explained, there was always a certain tenseness that preceded the draw—a stiffening of nerves in readiness for the task. Sometimes, if you could delay that tenseness in the other man by random talk, you could make your draw before he was set—"It's not a new trick." That was why a good gunfighter watched for the physical warning that always came a fraction of time before the move. It might be a quick blink, a sudden fixed stare, a tautness around the mouth or a downward jerk of one side of it, the uncontrollable twitch of a muscle, the involuntary flick of the tongue across dry lips; most often, it was the fleeting spark of light that showed in the eyes as the mind shot out the impulse ordering the muscles to act. This was what a prizefighter saw a split second before a fist snicked out toward his jaw; gunfighters saw it too, sometimes in time to beat the draw, sometimes too late. "Nine times out of ten, I'd say, the eyes will tell you before the hand; the tenth time, it will be something in the face."

As a cowhand, however young, Jess had naturally developed alertness to his surroundings and learned to observe and retain, to notice things like the shape and location of landmarks, the pattern of tracks or of clouds in the sky, the appearance of individual horses and cattle—or of men and their gear and mounts. Dixie taught him to plan, playing checkers with him, telling him of famous battles and how they'd been lost and won. He taught Jess to notice the ground and use it, metaphorically as well as literally; to always scan a room when he first entered it, noticing where people were, how they might go in and out, how the light fell, how the mirrors reflected. Taught him always to sit facing doors and to keep away from windows (except the frosted or leaded kind, which would keep people on the outside from being sure which shadow was his); to keep his back to walls—"But don't let yourself get cornered. Make sure you can move left or right as well as straight forward. That makes you harder to take, because anyone who wants to bottle you up needs himself and a couple of friends." To drink at a bar, if he had to, at the end, with his right side turned to the room, and to prefer to take his drink to a table. To never turn his left side to a man he didn't trust thoroughly, never get into a position where it would be difficult to clear his gun, never get caught off guard (because if your enemy suspected you might be faster than he was, he'd certainly try to do that), never try to run a bluff with a sixgun (without it was another thing entirely), never try to sight along the barrel or aim for the head. To learn to aim his weapon the same way as he'd point his finger. "Most people," Dixie said, "are naturally accurate with a finger. Notice, the next time you're in an argument, what happens when the other man starts pointing his to emphasize what he's saying: if it were a gun, you'd be dead. The trick, then, is to make your gun almost an extension of your hand, as if it grew out of your wrist, your forefinger spitting lead and flame. Some do it by laying the forefinger along the side of the barrel and pulling the trigger with the second, though that takes a big hand, like mine." To squat on one leg only, keeping the knee of his dominant side straight down in the dust, to give quick access to his weapon. To move to the side of the door, on going out of a lighted place into night-darkness, and stand there a minute to let his eyes adjust. To pick his fights, never let himself get pushed or railroaded into something unless he knew the situation, knew he wasn't being set up somehow—although that was one lesson that never completely sank in. Most important, not to start a fight. Always to let the other man bring it to him, and ideally with witnesses around. "That way," Dixie said, "the law's got no beef against you. If a badge does try to make a fuss afterward, you'll know it's because he has a grudge against gunfighters, or maybe you in particular. Then you just make sure to keep it public again, and eventually he'll either back off or have to make a move where people can see, and they'll know he pushed you into it. Even if you have to clear out of town afterward, you'll still be technically in the right. As long as you have witnesses—impartial witnesses—you can't be convicted for what you did, even if you go to trial."

Jess learned to shoot a pistol at a target, not flinching when Dixie fired beside him, not jerking when he yelled wildly, trying to hold steady even when Dixie shoved him. "Because men like to shoot back," the man said. He learned to shoot left-handed as well as right—"Maybe you won't be quite as fast or as confident that way, but if you practice long enough, you'll still be able to hit what you aim at, most times. And the mere fact that you're willing to try will throw your enemy off his game; there's a reason people talk of the 'dominant hand,' you know." He learned "rolling," the art of twirling his sixgun on his forefinger by holding it by the butt, his finger in the trigger guard, then releasing it with a downward jerk of the muzzle so the butt flipped upward and the gun spun once around. The trick was to catch the hammer with the extended thumb as it came back into position, so it was cocked by its own weight. "It's the best practice there is," Dixie said— "it limbers up your fingers, keeps them that way if you do it regularly, helps your timing and gets you used to the feel of your weapon, and once you've learned it, your gun will always come out cocked." He learned to squeeze the trigger gently when he fired, so the gun wouldn't "kick" so much, and to take the recoil with a flip of his wrist, levelling the weapon for his next shot. To pull the hammer back, not with the ball of his thumb, but with the second joint of it as his hand closed around the weapon—"that's one of the ways you can tell an experienced gunfighter from a novice," Dixie said. To check himself out before a fight, to read his body, to know if there was any part of him not up to snuff, and how to compensate for it, how to plan his moves and his strategy; to know exactly what he could and couldn't do, and never to fool himself the way he might try to fool or bluff someone else. He learned the many ways a hideout gun might be carried, and how to guess, from the way a man dressed and moved and held himself, which he favored; how to put on a bluff of harmlessness or co-operation when he was caught short, then seize his first opportunity to turn the tables. "Plan your moves. Always pick your place to fight. Don't make any threats and never walk away from any."

He learned to listen to his instinct, to hone it until it showed him how to take advantage of every factor in a given situation in order to come through safely. To keep in mind that the five things that made a successful gunfighter were speed, accuracy, the courage to fight, cold and steady nerve—the coolness and ability to avoid being flustered into too-hasty action, to draw and shoot deliberately, so as not to miss, and to get in just one accurate shot, despite bullets buzzing past his ears—and the fear he inspired in others, the last because no man wants to die, and a man facing a feared gunfighter might back down, or grab wildly for his gun and defeat himself. "Many a time the unflinching eye of a man with an established reputation for speed, accuracy, and steady nerves is as effective as a gun," Dixie said. He learned to value and stress coolness and accuracy over speed. "Certain men survive because they always take time to aim," Dixie explained. "Invariably they let the other man have the first shot, which is always hurried and therefore inaccurate. They fire second—and don't miss. Remember that much of your success is in your mind: there are usually words said before the guns come out, and if you can make your man believe you're faster than he is, you'll hurry him; if you do that, there's a chance he'll miss. But never let him hurry _you; _draw and shoot the way you've learned to." Agility of movement and steadiness of nerve would promote a quick draw and straight shooting, and it was vital to develop an eerie genius at sensing human emotions: you not only had to beat your opponent's draw, but to sense the very moment when he had reached his crisis. So you needed an intuitive ability to gauge human anger or anxiety or distress.

Other things Jess learned too, things that couldn't be conveyed in words or in demonstrations, couldn't be practiced the way he could practice his draw and his target-shooting; that came from within himself and could only become part of him by the doing. He learned to read men, to tell which were truly dangerous and which were bluffing. He learned that there were fights to stay with, and others that only a fool wouldn't back away from. He learned to listen to public talk, to check what one man said against another's version, and to separate out the obviously inflated claims from the truth; to use what he heard to know who had power where and how far a man was willing to go, what towns were best kept away from and when to leave the one he was in; to keep his nerves under iron control, and never get rattled no matter what was going on around him; to always keep himself as clean and well turned out as he could afford—not flashy, but good quality, in good repair and as neat and decent as trail life would allow. "People respect a man more when they see that he values himself," Dixie explained, "and a man who lets himself go has lost that." And by the same token, never to get sloppy-drunk, not only because it would leave him vulnerable to those who were sober, but because it would lower him in the eyes of those who saw it. "In a lot of cases, what people think of you doesn't matter as much as the truth you hold inside yourself," Dixie said. "But when you start behaving in certain ways, that can support their opinions. Remember that a lot of your edge, as a gunfighter, is in people _thinking_ they know how good you are. Often that alone will be enough to keep them from trying you."

He learned the rules Dixie had established for the conduct of his fighting. "Men, in a way, are like any other kind of game. They deserve a fair chance; they deserve to be hunted and killed respectfully, and not made to suffer. The fair chance comes from letting them know you're after them and why, and from facing them and not shooting them down from behind. The other... I think you can figure that out. A man who doesn't do those things isn't a gunfighter; he's just a killer, an outlaw." And: "Killing isn't for fun, and it's not a game. It's for survival—yours, or someone else's. There are those who do it just because they can, just for the pleasure of seeing blood spilled or of knowing they're better than the other man. Don't ever be like that." And: "Killing's nothing to brag on, either. That's why you won't see a real gunfighter with notches on his gun. Only a tinhorn notches his guns or tries to gun up a score. That's bragging. If you're really good, you don't need to brag. Others will spread your reputation around—more than you'd prefer, maybe." Most important: "Always give the other man an even break. Never kill from behind; never kill an unarmed man. It's not just about the law. It's about keeping your self-respect."

He learned the right way to drink—though, like the rule about being crowded, it wasn't something he always followed in later years. "Never gulp your liquor," Dixie said. "It hits you harder that way. Sip it. Make it last. You'll enjoy it more that way, and keep your edge better. Beer's different; it has a lower alcohol content, so it takes a lot more of it to impair you, though even with that, you should watch yourself. Even a mild buzz can mean the difference between life and death if the other man is sober."

Because poker was sometimes even more lucrative than gunwork, especially if it was important to build up a stake quickly, he learned to "play it right," as Dixie said. Learned the odds by heart, backwards and forwards and inside out—how likely he was to be dealt any pat hand, to improve what he got; how likely anyone else at the table was to have something better. Learned that poker was a game of luck only so long as he played with average players—but that they made up ninety-eight per cent of the whole. Learned to wait for a good hand, then milk it for every dollar it was worth. "That's the secret," Dixie said. "When you have a losing hand, get out quick. Wait, and wait, and wait till a fighting hand shows up. Then if it's a big one, underplay it; if it's second rate, overplay it—which, more often than not, will drive potential winners out. And every once in a while, mix it up to keep the smart players—like yourself, and me—from figuring it out.

"Don't stampede, ever," he said. "Don't get desperate. When you do, you just can't play right. You start yearning to get even, and that desire builds up till it starts crowding out your common sense. With a gun, maybe you can get even. With cards, it's not the other man you have to beat, which is a variable—it's odds that apply equally to everyone on the face of this planet, whether they play or don't, and that can't be changed."

A professional gambler, he said, needed to be a keen judge of human nature; had to have an intent, quiet watchfulness, steady nerves, coolness, and presence of mind. And to win at poker, he had to be an expert with five weapons: skill, courage, strategy, psychology, and patience. "So," said Dixie, "you can see why, inevitably, there's a certain amount of bleed-over between gambling and gunfighting; each profession requires traits that are useful in the other as well. That's why most gunfighters also gamble, and a fair share of gamblers—like me—can hold their own in a gunfight."

He cautioned his pupil never to touch alcohol at the poker table. "I've seen many a sound player send a good game out the window under the influence of hard liquor," he said, "calling everything in sight on a pair of threes. _Especially_ don't drink when you've hit a losing streak. That just makes your playing wilder. When you're losing, just get out. There'll always be another game."

He taught Jess how to run up a top or bottom stock while shuffling, how to shift the cut, deal from the top or the bottom, stack the deck, palm cards, second-deal, second-card, cold-deck, or set up a cold draw, "fixing" what he'd get, taking his own draw from the top and everybody else's from the bottom—or vice versa. Taught him all about "readers" and "bags" and "sand tell" decks, trimmed and marked cards and slick aces, mirrors in pipe-bowls or rings ("shiners") or matchboxes, daubing and shaving, false shuffling and false cutting, sleeve and belt and vest holdouts, linework, shadework, location, butting the cards, jumping or switching the cut, the "shark's grip," and the trick rings that could dimple a card just enough for a sensitive finger to feel. "But always remember," Dixie said, "that a real card man doesn't need any of those things. And you shouldn't either, unless you have reason to believe somebody else has started the ball rolling. A real card man only needs to know the odds, know they apply to him as much as to anyone else, and play accordingly."

It was a slow process; it took practice and more practice, patience and listening. Jess had grown up wild as the Panhandle winds: his pa had had a heavy hand at need, but had believed in licking his youngsters for only three offenses—lying, meddling with someone else's property, and leaving gates open for stock to get out by—and he'd never set foot in a schoolhouse. Yet he had learned, too, the importance of attention—being aware of your surroundings could mean the difference between life and death on the range—and the necessity of accepting responsibility, since in his family everybody had had to chip in and give a hand: from the time they were three all the kids had their chores. He knew about practicing, too, from learning to rope and to shoot a rifle, and even about patience, so necessary to hunting and tracking and to gentling a horse the slow Comanche way. To be sure, there were times when his native impatience and quick Harper temper would bristle up under Dixie's criticisms, which often sounded almost like insults, and his palm would start to itch for the butt of his gun; but always he reminded himself that it was better to be criticized than dead, that Dixie was giving him the knowledge he needed to settle his score with Bannister. And then he'd try to channel that anger, to harness it as riverboats and locomotives (neither of which he had ever yet seen) were said to harness the energy that came from burning wood, and to focus all the more tightly on the lesson of the moment. It wasn't always easy; if truth were known, it flew full in the face of his natural inclinations, not to speak of his still-fresh grief and rage. But he did it, just the same, because he knew it was necessary. And if Dixie criticized when he had to, he was also honest with his praise when Jess deserved it. Gradually there was less criticism and more praise; gradually Jess's skill and confidence increased, and as they did he realized just how hopelessly ill-suited he'd really been to the job he'd set for himself, how lucky he'd been to have found this man. What he didn't realize was that, along with the skills he was learning, he was gaining maturity.

It was in Denver that they heard of the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the outbreak of "shootin' war." Jess himself felt little imperative to take any part in it; his isolated boyhood had made most of the questions involved irrelevant to him, and it wasn't till he'd left the Panhandle that he'd even so much as seen any Negroes. But he knew—or at least guessed, from his nickname—that his mentor was Southern, and he'd seen that Southerners seemed passionately convinced that their section's viewpoint was the right one. "Ain't you ever fixin' to get into this war, Dixie?" he asked once.

"Not if I can help it," the man replied. "Thomas Jefferson once wrote, 'It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' But getting into the war—that would have the potential of doing both, or maybe a good bit worse. I'm not a politician, boy, and I'm not a planter, or anyone else who stands to lose if slavery is destroyed or limited, or to win if it's extended. I'm not even a Southerner any more, really; I'm a citizen of the world. I go where there are games to be played or gun jobs to be done. I don't ask the politics of my employer or my fellow players; the odds don't care what a man believes, and neither does a gun."

In Denver, too, Dixie insisted on outfitting him "so you look like a man should when he's following someone like me around." Black corduroy pants and good cotton and flannel shirts in strong, clear colors or clean checks or occasionally a soft blue that brought out the vividness of his eyes, soft leather vest, tight leather gloves ("Your hands are your fortune, whether you're earning your money by cards or your gun; take care of them"), a new black hat and a silver-ornamented band for it, black boots with rows of fancy red stitching decorating the sides, silver-plated spurs, high-quality cotton bandannas in bold patterns. And a Remington .44 like Dixie's own, because, he said, a heavier gun was more stable, could take recoil better and stand up to a heavier powder load—which in turn made for harder punch and greater accuracy. A rig for it, too, fitted to his side and the width of his body until it felt almost grafted to the skin of his thigh; holster of hard leather—"Softer leather will squeeze the gun and slow up your draw"—and never to be oiled, which softened the leather and made it grab: instead an occasional rub with saddle soap, or even ordinary laundry soap. Dixie showed him how to hone the Remington's factory-stiff action smooth so it worked with a feather touch, and file off the front sight so it wouldn't get hung up in the stitchings of the holster. Except for the gun and the rig, he looked like a cowboy—but a top hand, and one who had a certain sense of style and didn't blow all his money on whiskey and women; it was to become his signature look. It all cost close to $130, and at first Jess's touchy pride rebelled against all this largesse, but when he discovered that a stage guard was routinely paid $100 a month—four times what even the most experienced cowboy got in the Panhandle—and sometimes as much as $120 plus expenses, he stopped arguing, and in his first month, with the help of a run of good cards at poker, was able to pay it back.

Their first six months together they stayed around Denver, drifting from Gold Hill south to Colorado City, west to Fairplay and Cash Creek and Oro City, then up through the Jackson and Gregory and Deadwood Diggings and back into Denver again, playing poker, hiring out as shotgun riders and bullion guards, mine security and faro lookouts; Dixie killed a man over a poker table in Breckenridge, and Jess shot a pair of road-agents—and collected a couple of painful flesh wounds to the left leg that kept him limping and dismounted for over a week—on the road between Idaho Springs and Mountain City. Neither experience was pleasant, but they taught him that he could endure physical pain and end another human life without falling apart, though not without a certain feeling of diminishment—which, Dixie assured him, was good; a man who couldn't feel even a little regret at killing was no longer a man. Denver made him uneasy—already it boasted a population of over 5800, more people than he had ever seen in a single place—and even some of the outlying camps harbored 2000 or more, having grown by two to four times in a month. They were also more heterogenous, even cosmopolitan, than anything he'd seen in Texas, with a large percentage of foreign-born—Germans, Poles, Swedes, Canucks, Greeks, Jews, Mexicans, Chinese, Cornishmen and Northcountry English, Irish and Welsh, Frenchmen, Russians—besides Americans, Northern and Southern and Midwestern, everything from youngsters fresh out of the East, where the effects of the last panic remained a recent memory, to veterans who'd first gone West to try their luck in California; and some had a saloon for every 200 men, women, and children (not that there were very many of the latter two). Still, it was perhaps the best kind of training he could have had; it knocked the "country" out of him in a hurry, compensating for the cultural deprivations of the Panhandle, and helped him learn to feel at ease in even the oddest situations. There was always something going on, often competitive enough to be bet-worthy (and miners would bet on anything)—footraces, horseraces, dogfights, cockfights, prizefights, the occasional bullfight, hard-rock-drilling contests, even bull- and bear-baiting, burro fights, and once (to Jess's complete astonishment) a scrap between dogs and a "killer duck." Any worthwhile camp had a theater or an opera house (often both, or even more than one), and notwithstanding that there was a war on, the greatest names from the East came to play at them; Dixie, like all gamblers, loved the theater and introduced his protégé to the stage, though Jess generally preferred the simpler, livelier shows—minstrel troupes, variety, singers and dancers (mostly female)—in the saloons.

With the onset of the cold weather, the pair headed south, into New Mexico, where the fertile Mesilla Valley, which had remained unsettled during the days of Spanish control, had begun in the '50s to blossom as the principal agricultural and population center of the southern part of the Territory. Many of the settlers here were ranchers out of nearby Texas, among whom Jess felt more at home; some were beginning to disagree over boundaries and water, and there was a mild but persistent demand for good guns, not necessarily to fight, but to keep the other fellow from starting something. Moreover, the Mexican border was close by, and as the _bandidos_ below the line began hearing rumors of the war back East, the possibility of raids increased as cattlemen, or their sons, and their cowhands headed off to enlist.

They'd been together eight months before Jess screwed up the courage to ask Dixie why he'd taken him in hand. "I didn't mean nothin' to you," he said. "I'd'a' killed you at that table, if I could'a'. You knew that. And yet you been teachin' me, treatin' me like I was just as good as you—"

Dixie gazed thoughtfully into their campfire, then down at the crystal ring on his hand; he turned it restlessly on his finger. "Ever see anything like this?" he asked, holding it out for Jess's inspection.

The youngster shook his head. "No. What is it?"

"A remembrance ring. Women use brooches for the same purpose. You carry a lock of a loved one's hair in it."

Jess frowned. "Why?"

Dixie shrugged. "Why do you wear mourning? Why do you put up a gravestone? Because it's expected. Because you want to honor your dead. To show you haven't forgotten."

"I don't need no lock of hair for that," Jess growled. Then, milder: "Whose is it?"

"My sister. Her name was Louisa Christine, but I called her Lou. We were twins." He sat back against his saddle, his eyes distant, and Jess waited with the poker patience he'd been taught, knowing that a story was coming. "We were seventeen in '46, when the war with Mexico broke out. I signed up right away, took the boat to New Orleans with a local militia company. We debarked at Corpus Christi and rode overland to Matamoras to join General Taylor. Fought at Monterrey, then got transferred to Scott's command, Buena Vista, Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, Mexico City.

"Meanwhile, back at home, Lou was being seriously courted for the first time in her life. The man—and I call him that by courtesy—was a wild young scapegrace, only twenty, a heartbreaker and a gambler, but he knew beauty when he saw it. His father was a tobacco dealer, a well-off widower, and Stephen was his youngest and his favorite; his older brothers were in the militia with me, but the old man wouldn't hear of Stephen going along, not that I think he made much of a to-do about it. He'd always had pretty much anything he wanted, and hadn't had to do anything he didn't want.

"If I'd known Lou was going with him, I might have tried to make her see he was trouble. But I was more than 1200 miles away, and lucky to see the mail carrier once a month. I didn't know the whole story of what happened till it was too late. Stephen kept her on the string till he tired of her, then turned up at a party with her greatest rival from school on his arm. She'd thought he loved her, thought they'd marry—not right away, maybe, but in a few years. She was devastated. She ran out of the house... and threw herself in the river. By the time I got home, she'd been dead almost a year, and our mother had gone into a decline from the shock; she only lasted another two months. That was when I left Kentucky for good."

"What about Stephen?" Jess asked. "Did you call him out? I would'a', if it'd been one of _my_ sisters."

"No, I was even too late to do that. It seemed that about three months after Lou's death, he got into a card game with a fellow who happened to be pursuing a young actress he was interested in too. The fellow saw his chance, accused Stephen of cheating, and killed him in a duel the next morning." Dixie sighed and was silent for a minute or two. Then he said: "I couldn't settle things for Lou. But I can help you learn what you need to settle things for your family. I couldn't save her life, but I can give you the skills that may save yours. And that's why I took you on, Jess. As a... a memorial to my sister. Because I couldn't help her, but I could help you, and that, somehow, makes it a little easier to bear."

Jess slowly gathered up a half-dozen slender sticks of kindling, thoughtfully packed them into a bundle between his hands, and then snapped them sharply in two before tossing them onto the flames. "Life ain't hardly fair," he said in a soft, bitter voice that sounded decades older than sixteen. "Innocent folks die, and them that's responsible don't get punished. I recollect a Bible verse my ma read once, somethin' about the wicked flourishin' like the green bay tree. I ain't ever seen a green bay tree, but they sure do seem to flourish."

"They do," Dixie agreed. "But you can't let it get to you, Jess. You have to remember you were given a life too, and life is for living. A time comes when you say to yourself, it's time to let go. Time to stop living your life for somebody else's sake and start living it for your own again."

"_You_ ain't," said Jess boldly, "or you wouldn't still be wearin' that."

"No, I guess I wouldn't," Dixie agreed, "but at least I've realized that I will, eventually." Jess knew what he was going to say next before he heard the words. "And you will too, Jess."

Jess's mouth compressed; he shook his head, eyes flashing, a nerve jumping in his cheek—since the fire he'd developed an assortment of involuntary tics that manifested when his emotions were at a particularly high stretch. "Not me, Dixie. Not till I see Bannister dead at my feet. It ain't the same for me as for you."

"I know that. I can't even imagine how you must have felt. But you have to ask yourself, what would _they_ want, if they cared for you? To have you die before time, or turn into a stone-cold killing machine? Or to make a new life for yourself, and in doing that throw your challenge back into the face of life and the Bannisters? To show them that they didn't break you? No," he smiled slightly, "I know you don't believe it now; you're still too close to what happened. But it'll come, Jess, I guarantee you it will. One day you'll find something or someone—a town, a woman, a cause, a friend—that'll touch that lump of ice you call your heart, and bring you back to life again."

Jess only shook his head and didn't respond. He knew Dixie was older, and far wiser in the ways of the world; but like any youngster his age, Jess had a hard time believing that the way he felt now wasn't the way he would always feel. Couldn't imagine the possibility of a day coming when his losses and his pain weren't the first things that came into his head when he rolled out of his bed in the morning—or the last things that ran through his mind as he drifted off at night. Or of a time when his sleep wasn't regularly broken by the nightmares that brought him bolt upright in his blankets, gasping and shaking and bathed in cold sweat, sometimes with his throat raw from a fading scream.

Wasn't even sure he'd want such a thing. If he forgot their deaths, wouldn't that mean his family had died in vain?

Dixie knew about the dreams, he was pretty sure, though the man never spoke to him about to them. Well, he didn't need to; he'd heard the story in Weatherford, he knew what had happened to force Jess out on this vengeance trail.

Around the beginning of the year they moved on again, this time to Piños Altos in the southwestern corner of the Territory, where gold had been discovered in '51, bringing men flocking in at once. As was customary, even that early, the laws regarding claims and mining had been patterned after those of California, including the infamous provision that gave the locater the right to all the "dips, spurs, angles and variations" of his vein wheresoever they extended. After a decade of working, inevitably, "everybody's spurs were running into everybody else's angles," and lawsuits and guns were equally resorted to in an effort to retain possession. This meant work for hired guns, as did the possibility of labor disputes and the necessity of security for outgoing shipments of milled ore.

Throughout their wanderings Jess had continued to listen for any word of the Bannisters, but it hadn't really occurred to him that any of the gang would have left Texas; the state was so big, why would they need to? So, when he heard in a Piños Altos saloon that a known member of the outfit had been seen in the What Cheer House—one of the best bordellos-cum-gambling-houses that the camp afforded—he was at first not sure whether he should believe it. He cautiously got the man's name and description—he'd apparently been working security for one of the more troubled mines, which meant he was basically a strikebreaker being kept on the string in case of need—and glanced briefly toward one of the poker tables, where Dixie as usual was sitting in on a game. Generally at such times Jess would stay out and act as a lookout for his mentor, but as he studied the other players, estimating them by the criteria he had learned these past months, he decided none was likely to be either a card shark or an especially dangerous gun; they were the kind Dixie could handle for himself, if trouble came up. It had been almost two years, now, since he had been on this hunt; he couldn't risk ignoring the possibility that the information he'd gotten was correct. Quietly he made his way out of the room and headed for the What Cheer.

Half an hour later gunfire exploded from a block or so up the street. Everyone looked up, and as Dixie Howard's eyes swept across the room, he noted the absence of his pupil's lean, graceful form and distinctively cockled hatband. Of course Jess might simply have needed the outhouse—but he might not. "Gentlemen, deal me out," he said, and scooped up his winnings.

Outside, men were running, all in one direction. There were no more shots, but enough shouts for Dixie to know where the gunfire was thought to have come from. He followed the trend.

In the game room of the What Cheer he found Jess, pale but calm, facing one of the camp's deputies over the body of a dead man that lay on the floor. The madam was there too, and several girls and customers, all insisting that it had been a fair fight, that Jess had called the dead man, had accused him of helping to murder his family, and hadn't gone for his gun first. Dixie stayed in the background, just in case Jess might need an ace in the hole, but his witnesses seemed to have the situation well in hand. After a time the deputy nodded and said, "All right, we'll want you at the coroner's inquest, but from what I see and hear, I don't reckon you're in trouble. You can go."

The group gradually broke up; the bouncer appeared with a shutter and a couple of helpers and bore the body away. Jess took a long, slow breath, then another, and Dixie quietly went over to join him. "You all right?"

"What?" Jess looked around, blinking, and then realized who had spoken. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine." He nodded toward the archway through which the corpse had been removed. "I got one of 'em."

"He was one of Bannister's?"

"I called him on it and he didn't deny it," Jess agreed. He sighed. "I'm payin' my score, Dixie. Maybe it'll take me all my life, but I ain't quittin' till it's done."

"Guess you're not," Howard agreed. "Come on, I don't think you're exactly welcome here, after the way you broke things up. I'll buy you a drink."

**SR**

In New Mexico Territory, as in all the old Spanish possessions, large individual land grants had been given out wholesale to encourage settlement and commerce, and their boundaries, due to a lack of surveyors, were inexactly determined, using natural landmarks such as large rocks, prominent trees, springs, and arroyos. The American conquest and the introduction of a new legal system had quickly resulted in a tangled web of claims and counterclaims, even though the treaty that ended the Mexican War had guaranteed all citizens of New Mexico equal rights under the law and security in their holdings, and Congress, in 1854, had created the Office of the Surveyor-General specifically to adjuciate them. Lawyers soon jumped in, receiving huge fees for clearing titles—usually paid from the common landholds, so that over the years they acquired possession of prodigious tracts of ground. But some of the grantees, or their heirs, weren't prepared to give up, especially the former mountain men and Santa Fe traders who had come in in the '20's and '30's and taken wives from the Mexican population, often from prominent families. So, here as further south, there was a need for guns. Jess and Dixie made their way into the middle of it all and fought, for a time, with a dark-eyed fellow from Missouri named Hal Owen, about ten years Jess's senior, as they defended the boundaries of a couple of the old grants from latecoming interlopers. Jess and Owen got along well; perhaps not exactly close friends—Jess was still shy about granting his trust or opening his bruised heart—but amicably enough that, at one point, Jess saved the older man from a bushwhacker's bullet. Owen lost two fingers off his left hand and Jess got a bullet through his right arm, but both of them survived the experience; the bushwhacker didn't, thanks chiefly to the lessons Dixie had given Jess in shooting with his left. It was Owen who told Jess, "There's always a choice. It may not be a good one, and it may take some lookin' till you find it; but it's there, always." It was something Jess was to think about many times in the years to come, especially when pondering what side to take in any argument... and ultimately on a road outside Laramie, Wyoming, when a tall rancher offered him a job.

News of the war's outbreak had reached the Territory early the previous summer, but it was heavily Spanish-American, and those white settlers present—most of them either veterans of the Mexican War who'd taken up land with their soldier scrip, or former trappers or traders and their offspring, often half-Mexican—were for the most part of strongly anti-Texas leanings, since Texans had long had hungry eyes for New Mexico and were about as popular there as they were in Old Mexico. But Texans went where they pleased, popular or not, so the Territory was used to seeing them.

Nevertheless, Texas was close enough that news still filtered in from there. The Union blockade never extended to the Rio Grande (though it did inconvenience Galveston for a time), and incoming ships could bring all manner of foodstuffs and luxuries; but the first principle of profitable trading—to stock only what the customer could buy—limited these imports to a mere dribble, since the boatmen had no use for Confederate money. Texans with coin, or with goods to trade, didn't suffer much, on account of wagons of goods up from Bagdad, the seaport for Brownsville (the Texan terminus of the Cotton Road from Houston) and Matamoras. Trade was heavy along the border, and the cotton trade was especially profitable. The Cotton Road stretched a thousand miles, all the way down to the Guatemalan border; of the Texan section of it, only the eastern part was fertile and well populated, the rest rough, barren, sparsely-inhabited frontier country infested with renegades and hostile Indians, part of it desert in the grip of drought since 1860. The freighters needed guards for their caravans and were willing to pay well—and not necessarily in Confederate money; though much of the Bagdad trade went through middlemen, farsighted German merchants who had quickly built warehouses there to hold the cotton they bought to resell, as neutrally owned, to European markets, some of it was done directly, with blockade-runner captains, many of whom were British subjects, and paid in British banknotes or even gold.

Cotton was bulky, but a determined outlaw band, if it could wipe out the freighters and their guards, could make a young fortune from just one successful raid. And the luxuries that were brought back up the Road from Brownsville were both easier to handle and eminently saleable at just about any price the traffic would bear. Even Dixie, though he wasn't sanguine about the draft that the Confederacy had put in place nearly a year earlier, could see that demand made for high wages. So, in late February of '63, after nearly two years together, he and Jess, with Owen tagging along for company, headed east again.

Jess was almost eighteen by the time they reached Houston, and had reached his full growth, five feet eleven, still lean and wiry but somewhat less starved-looking than he'd been that fateful day in Lampasas. Dixie's training had given him confidence and grace, and experience in a variety of fights had tested him and found him not wanting. His steady eyes and grim lips were enough to back many a lesser gun down, and his alertness, quick reactions, and graceful athleticism had preserved him through several close calls. His smile was usually a wry, tight-lipped twist, though when he was intrigued or caught off-guard it could be boyish-bright as he got some distance on his losses. Nightmares still plagued him, two or three nights a week, but he had come to accept them, now, as being (probably) a forever part of his life, and in doing so, because he half expected them, had taken some of their sting out. He would never be noted for his patience, except at poker, where he could summon an unholy amount of it if he thought the game worth the trouble, and his first resolve remained to kill Frank Bannister. But he had settled into his plan. He would do as he'd told Dixie in Weatherford, take the outlaw's backups down one or two at a time. And meanwhile Bannister would be getting older and slowing down, and a day would come when Jess—still, he hoped, at his youthful peak—would find him and face him and settle the score for his family.

In Houston there was word of the gang; as Jess had half suspected, they were believed to have attacked several of the caravans on the Cotton Road. It was said that the Rangers had nailed a couple of them, and possibly others had fallen to caravan defenders, although it wasn't hard for Bannister to recruit replacements, at least temporary ones, from among the desperadoes who haunted the Road's southern stretch.

The trio quickly found work as guards for a southbound cotton train, and in Kingsville Jess got on the track of a stranger who seemed entirely too interested in its route and the number of men it had. There was a gun duel and the stranger died. Items found on the body indicated that the deceased was a spy for Bannister. Jess added a second notch to the mental tally he was keeping, figuring that a job of this kind would only have been assigned to a long-time gangmember whom Bannister knew he could count on, and the train went on its way and reached Brownsville in safety: better than three hundred miles, most of a month for the slow-moving oxen that hauled the five-and-a-half-ton freight rigs. They were paid—and generously, Jess in particular—in Mexican silver and British gold; _pesos,_ though often scornfully called _"dobe_ dollars," were worth more for the silver in them than their face value, which made them eminently exchangeable and so acceptable. Flush, the three trailmates accompanied the train back home with its load of imports. But in packed and bustling Houston, to which many people had refugeed from the Indian-threatened outer counties and even, increasingly, from the eastern Confederate states, Dixie was even more uneasy than he'd been before. "I've got a notion the conscription people have their eyes on us, boys," he told Jess and Owen in a saloon one evening. "The Confederacy may need the money it gets for selling its cotton, and it may need the things that money can buy, but it needs warm bodies equally, if not more—especially when they're good with guns. This war's been on two years now; a lot more men have been killed than the South anticipated or could really afford."

Jess sipped delicately at his drink—good whiskey might be worth its weight in gold, but Texans still made their own rye, their own peach and cherry and peach-and-apple brandy, German _schnapps_ and beer, cane liquor and 'simmon beer, and homemade wines, dandelion, dewberry, blackberry, mustang-grape; he'd found the last of these a satisfactory substitute for the scarce other. "So what do you reckon on doin'?" he asked.

"I told you once before, this war's no business of mine," Dixie said. "I'm heading for Mexico. Once I get over the Rio I can take my time heading west. There's no war in California, and no Indians either—not the hostile kind, anyway. You're both welcome, if you want to come," he added.

Owen pondered. "Might not be no Indians in California," he said, "but there's sure plenty of 'em in betwixt Matamoras and Yuma, by what I hear tell. Reckon two men might have a better chance to get through than one, and I ain't seen California. I'll go."

"And you, Jess?" Dixie looked at his protégé.

Jess took another sip of his wine and played restlessly with the glass. "I ain't forgot I owe you, Dixie," he said quietly, after a minute. "But I got a prior obligation, you know that. Bannister's lost one spy, but it don't mean he won't get another. I ain't got but two of his outfit in three years. That rate it'll take me thirty to work my way up to'im. 'Course some of 'em'll be got by the law or whoever else, but like you said once, I got a life of my own, and I reckon maybe I'd like to live some of it for myself. No, I got to stay. It's the best chance I've had yet."

Dixie sighed and nodded. "I understand. Well, I've taught you all I can; the rest you'll have to work out for yourself through experience. Good luck, Jess, and I hope you do what you've sworn to. But remember what I told you. The time will come when you know it's time to let go. Be ready for it."

They shook hands, and in the morning Dixie and Owen were gone.

Three days later Jess was taken up by the conscription bureau. Because he already owned a horse, he was assigned as a replacement for a cavalry regiment and joined a party heading east. He had opportunities enough to desert, and he was tempted; the Bannisters were back there, and he'd have a good chance to cut their numbers down if he could slip away. But whether under duress or not, he'd given his promise by scrawling his name on the muster-roll. A man's word had to be good. No, he'd stay. He didn't feel any particular patriotic zeal for the Confederate cause—still wasn't entirely sure, despite Dixie's patient lessons about economics and politics, that he understood what all the fuss was about. But he was a Texan, and his state was threatened, or so everybody insisted. Bannister, like the famous leopard, was unlikely to change his spots. There'd be time to get him.

Barely a month after his group crossed the Mississippi, Vicksburg fell and the Confederacy was sliced in two, cutting Texas off from her fellow states. And Jess, effectively trapped in the East, entered a new stage in his life.

-30-


End file.
